The World Turned Upside Down
Versions of Globalism
The World Turned Upside Down
When I was pursuing my doctoral studies in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1980s and early 1990s I inhabited a particular counter-cultural progressive zeitgeist. It involved, among other things, a deep suspicion of government agencies such as the CIA and FBI (busy surveilling so-called subversives or aiding the overthrow of Latin American democracies). It involved an embrace of alternative forms of medicine fueled by knowledge of machinations of the health-care industry in Tuskegee, Alabama (where Black people had been led to believe they were being treated for syphilis when, in fact, they were not), in India (where women were forcefully sterilized), or in Wales and many other countries where women treated with the drug Thalidomide as a tranquilizer gave birth to thousands of babies with severe deformities. It even involved a healthy disrespect for the University and the education system in general, which was seen as either a factory for the production of compliant cogs in the machinations of capitalism or, as a space where truly radical ideas were systematically excluded and erased. This was also a time when the word “globalization” was becoming part of widespread conversations (especially in a geography department). We were not yet using the word “neoliberalism” as a term of abuse, but it was just around the corner. Globalization was simply the most recent stage of capitalism as footloose capital was able to travel the globe to find new ways of extracting profit from relatively immobile workers. This general vibe continued into the nineties in rural West Wales where we were surrounded by English incomers getting back to the land, practicing self-sufficiency, electing to have home births (us included), possibly home schooling and, in some instances briefly falling for the discredited anti-vaccine “research” of Andrew Wakefield linking MMR vaccines to autism. By then, Tony Blair was telling us that globalization was inevitable and we had no choice but to make the most of it. Bill Clinton was bringing NAFTA into existence. Neoliberalism - the belief in denationalization, small government, broadly unfettered free markets, and individualism – had been born in its modern form in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Neoliberalism quickly became the easiest, and often unthought out, term of abuse on the liberal and progressive left.
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The critique of the global has other histories too. In our current climate, and particularly since Trump came to prominence, the term “globalist” has become a term of abuse. This term has an interesting history. A google ngram shows us that the word has really taken off in popularity since 2012. There was also a little bump in popularity, however, in the late 1940s reaching a peak around 1954. This is largely due to its use in hearings held by the US House of Representatives Committee to Investigate Tax-exempt Foundations during a time known for the activities of House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Committee was set up to:
“conduct a full and complete investigation and study of educational an (sic) philanthropic foundations and other comparable organizations which are exempt from Federal income taxation to determine if foundations and organizations are using their resources for purposes other than the purposes for which they were established, and especially to determine which such foundations and organizations are using their resources for un-American and subversive activities; for political purposes; propaganda, or attempted to influence legislation”[1]
Among the records is an account of the activities of the National Education Association which was, at the time, a public education advocacy organization (it later became a Union). The text warns against the rise of the United Nations and its effect on school children who, the text insists are being indoctrinated into “world mindedness”. Terms like “world mindedness” are intermingled with “internationalism” and, following the interventions of Northwestern University based conservative political scientist Professor Kenneth Colegrove – “globalism”. This globalism, it was argued, led to the breakdown of nationalism and that such a breakdown was a prerequisite for communism. In addition to the National Education Association, the Committee explored the activities of the Carnegie Endowment, The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation noting their funding of the Council on Foreign Relations – an organization, they insisted, which was dedicated to the promotion of globalism. In a survey of books distributed by the Carnegie Endowment, Professor Colegrove was asked to give his opinion on both the books and their authors. His comments are listed below. The term “globalist” appears alongside “leftist”, “communist” amd “Marxian” as a term of critique.
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It is this latter strain of anti-globalism that was reborn with the widespread use of the term “globalist” as a term of abuse by the right wing provocateur Alex Jones who used the term alongside the idea of a “deep state” and a “new world order” in ways that reminded careful listeners of longstanding forms of anti-semitism. Globalism, to Jones, was a “global digital panopticon control system” instigated by an international elite with no loyalty to national interests.[2] This is almost exactly the way that Hitler and Nazi thinkers portrayed Jews in the 1930s – as placeless and rootless people not tied to the deep Germanic soils in the way that Aryans allegedly were.[3] But the geographical imaginary of globalism and the globalist were just one part of a constellation of enemies outlined by the new Trumpian right including the medical establishment (vaccines!), educational establishments (Harvard, Columbia, The Department of Education, Public schools in general), the FBI and CIA (who are both apparently woke organisations infected by the allegedly Marxist agendas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).
Being anti-globalist also means being anti-neoliberal, at least performatively, if not in actuality. Trump’s insistence on “American first” and his wildly fluctuating and random use of tariffs are clearly not free-trade friendly in any conventional sense. Trump’s tariff policy also weirdly mirrors the economic thinking and practice of Marxist economic theorists of development like Andre Gunder Frank.[4] Frank’s ‘dependency theory’ encouraged “import-substutition industrialization” as a route out of economic dependency and exploitation by wealthy western countries. It attempted to produce self-sufficient economies by producing goods locally that would otherwise be imported and imposing tarrifs on foreign imports. This was a noted strategy in India. For a long time, any backpacker travelling in India up to the early 1990s would be accustomed to drinking “Thumb’s Up” cola due to the unavailability of more familiar (to us) Western alternatives. This was before India signed up to the tenets of neoliberalism. Trump is bizarrely arguing that, and acting as if, the United States is not the global hegemon but, instead, an exploited and economically dependent country.
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So, here we are in a world that appears to be turned upside down, where Trump’s authoritarian nationalism, at first blush at least, looks a lot like the positions of progressives in the early 1990s. Behind this are geographical imaginations of the global (and the cohort of globalists that allegedly promote globalisation) and the national and local. Progressives (myself included) imagined the globalists (though we did not use that term) as a pro-capitalist, neoliberal elite who were seeking ways to move capital around the world to find new opportunities for the extraction of profit from cheap labour and to simultaneously eradicate the safeguards of state regulation. The critique of globalisation was a critique of capitalism that accompanied critiques of many other institutions – many of which are now being critiqued and attacked by the authoritarian right. The new authoritarian right critique of globalism shares some of the same language, and even apes the economic theory of a Marxist scholar like Andre Gunder Frank, but has more in common with the use of the term “globalist” by Professor Kenneth Colegrove and the Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations in the 1950s. Indeed, it is notable that the Trump administration is once again attacking tax-exempt educational institutions such as Harvard and raising the possibility of taxing them while attempting to withdraw visas issued to their interntional students – a clear assault on at least one form of “globalism”. It is not surprising then, that one of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci’s more pithy statements from his Prison Notebooks has again become popular among observers of the current moment:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Hearings/cKQp-0f1EXEC?hl=en&gbpv=1 Hearings before the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations. House of Representatives, 83rd Congress, Second Session on H.Res. 217, Washington D.C.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/globalism-right-trump.html
[3] Mosse, G. L. (1966). Nazi culture: intellectual, cultural, and social life in the Third Reich ([1st ] ed.). Grosset & Dunlap.
[4] Frank, A. G. (1970). Latin America: underdevelopment or revolution; essays on the development of underdevelopment and the immediate enemy. Monthly Review Press.